Haunted Travelogue: Hometowns, Ghost Towns, and Memories of War

In late July 2007 I traveled to Sakaiminato in Tottori prefecture, hometown of Mizuki Shigeru (b. 1922), the prolific manga/anime artist famous for his graphic narratives concerning Japanese monsters and spirits known as yōkai. Mizuki is especially well known as the creator of Gegege no Kitarō, which has appeared since the 1960s as a manga and as numerous animated television series, has been adapted for video games, and most recently was produced as a 2007 live-action movie, with a sequel in 2008. In contemporary Japan, Mizuki’s yōkai images are so deeply ingrained in the cultural imagination that you would be hard-pressed to find a child or adult unfamiliar with Kitarō or Mizuki’s other paradigmatic creations. In addition to his creative and narrative work, Mizuki is also a yōkai researcher who has explored religious and secular traditions to illustrate and describe numerous “real” yōkai from around Japan, effectively (re)popularizing supernatural imagery and folk beliefs among a wide readership.¹

Another facet of Mizuki’s work stems from his personal experiences as a child growing up in rural Sakaiminato and as a soldier during World War II. In a series of memoirs, both prose and manga, Mizuki’s war experience figures as a terrible trial by fire out of which he emerges reborn and forever altered. And Sakaiminato, where he innocently spent his childhood before the war, comes to represent an eternally premodern place in which yōkai, and the dreams they inspire, still have meaning. It is in Sakaiminato that he hears stories from an old woman called Nonnonbaa (Granny Nonnon), who teaches him about yōkai and how they interact with the human realm. Mizuki lionizes Sakaiminato as a pure furusato or hometown, a nostalgic space metonymic of a time all but forgotten in postwar and postindustrial Japan.

In the last volume of Mechademia, I contributed an essay on Mizuki that touched on this portrayal of Sakaiminato as an Edenic otherworld where the mysteries of the past are preserved. I concluded, in effect, that the construction of such an otherworld—through manga, anime, and the narrativization of memory—reflects not only a conservative longing for a time already passed but also a creative desire for a better future. In the final stages of writing that piece I visited Sakaiminato to take some pictures to accompany the essay, and began to think about how yōkai and the nostalgic sentiments they signify are embedded in the village itself. That trip inspired me to write the present essay, in which I reconsider Mizuki’s brand of hopeful nostalgia with a slightly more critical eye, attempting to appreciate but also to resist the redemptive logic of the nostalgic narrative and seek instead the cracks that, ultimately, make such narratives meaningful.

Traveling to Sakaiminato

Even today a journey to Sakaiminato is a slow passage through lush countryside, as if you are gradually shedding the bustling contemporary world. The train from Okayama into Tottori snakes through overgrown valleys and mountains spiked with cedar, and across shallow rocky rivers with water like scratched crystal refracting the sunlight. Crows perch on branches and an occasional egret sprouts like an exotic white plant from the banks of a creek. There are villages too: a cluster of houses balanced along a hillside or neatly ensconced among rice paddies or surrounded by fields of scallions and watermelons. And as the train trundles by, you might catch a glimpse of an old man peering up from his work, his eyes sheltered from the sun by a broad-brimmed straw hat.

Once you finally arrive in Sakaiminato, there is undoubtedly something otherworldly about the place, but the uncanniness does not stem from a disassociation with commercial enterprise and popular culture; rather it is quite the opposite. In the last several decades, villages throughout Japan have struggled to reenergize their economies through processes known as mura okoshi (village revitalization) or furusato zukuri (hometown making). Such revitalization efforts often exploit or develop a particular cultural resource or local industry. In the case of Sakaiminato, that resource/industry is the link with Mizuki.²

I will not investigate the economics of this revitalization project or explore the political and practical aspects of its implementation here. Rather, I would like to offer a professedly unscientific travelogue through the Mizuki/yōkai narrative as it is constructed in Sakaiminato and the surrounding countryside, and also recounted in Mizuki’s historical and autobiographical retelling of the events of the Shōwa period (1926–1989). In a sense, the Mizuki narrative tells of trial and rebirth, and of transcending the cataclysm of war. To set this uplifting narrative in relief, I also take another brief excursion, this one to a museum dedicated to artists who, unlike Mizuki, did not survive the war, a place that provides a narrative very different from the story of redemption displayed in Sakaiminato. In exploring these two different sites of memory, I focus particularly on the function of nostalgia as a mode of both remembering and forgetting. Because nostalgia can often be seductive, it is important to recognize that the narrative it articulates is only part of the story—or, rather, that there are also many other, less satisfying, stories that should also be remembered.

The Kitarō Train to Sakaiminato: Landscape with Monsters

The journey from Okayama to the city of Yonago takes about two hours; from there, you transfer to the Sakai Line for the forty-five minute trip to Sakaiminato. For all intents and purposes, however, the Mizuki adventure begins before you even depart Yonago. A bronze statue of Kitarō, the charming yōkai boy star of Gegege no Kitarō, greets you on the Sakai Line platform, and many of the trains on this local line are one-car vehicles dedicated to characters in the series. I happened to arrive on a Sunday afternoon, just in time to board the Kitarō train, festooned inside and out with colorful pictures of Kitarō himself (Figure 1).³ As I stood on the platform admiring the train, two middle- aged women asked me to take a picture of them posing in front of it. Several small children squealed with delight when they saw the train, and then clambered onto the bronze statue of the yōkai hero, their parents clicking photos. Despite the Disneyesque feel, however, not all the passengers are tourists: in particular, junior high school students in uniform board and get off at stops along the way.

Including Yonago and Sakaiminato, there are sixteen stations on the Sakai Line, each labeled with a place-name. But in addition, every station, often nothing more than a single cement platform, also has an alternate name derived from a yōkai. Yumigahama Station, for example, has a sign denoting it as Azuki arai Station (after the Azuki arai yōkai found in the Tōkai region). The yōkai themselves are selected from regions throughout the Japanese archipelago—including, significantly, Okinawa and Hokkaidō.

Figure 1.

The Kitarō train. Photograph by author.

In this way, Mizuki’s yōkai world is stitched into the landscape, like a doppelganger realm supplementing the immediately apparent present. Not only do the yōkai metonymically represent their particular region of origin, reproducing across the several rural miles of the Sakai Line a map of Japan in miniature, but disparate groups (Okinawans, Ainu) are also purposefully included in the construction of the (yōkai) nation. With each region and its inhabitants signified by a particular yōkai, the forty-five-minute journey is reminiscent of the traditional literary convention of the michiyuki, found in nō theater, puppet theater, and other dramatic forms, in which characters move symbolically through a constructed landscape coded with poetic or historically significant places names. The michiyuki is a device that draws the readers/audience (or in this case, passengers) into, as one scholar puts it, “a world apart, where unexpected, wondrous beings and events are likely to be encountered.”⁴

With this in mind, it is no coincidence that Sakaiminato Station, terminus of the Sakai Line and destination for so many Mizuki/yōkai fans, is named for Kitarō, the optimistic, good-hearted boy yōkai. It is as if the train has taken you back in time, to a forgotten rural town certainly, but also to a prelapsarian moment when, like the vision represented by Kitarō, the world was innocent, childish, and full of possibility. I walk out of the station and immediately see a small crowd of people gathered around a life-sized bronze statue of Mizuki himself, sitting at a bronze desk, writing. He is facing away from the station, as if generating with his pen and paper the town that spreads out before him (Figure 2).

On the Road

The primary tourist attraction in Sakaiminato is Mizuki Shigeru Road. At first glance, the Road is unremarkable—a typical narrow street, part of it covered with an arcade, with small shops and restaurants on either side. But every twenty or thirty feet there is a small bronze statue, anywhere between six and thirty inches high, perched atop a stone pedestal. Each neatly labeled figure represents a yōkai documented by Mizuki in his books. Around these diminutive statues you often find a cluster of tourists, posing and taking pictures. Children excitedly shout out the name of the yōkai in question, while older visitors bend down to carefully read the engraved nameplate.

Almost a kilometer long, Mizuki Shigeru Road is festooned with some 120 of these bronze figurines. The idea for the road was first proposed in 1989 by city employees who envisioned it as away to liven up the once-bustling shopping street near the station. The initial city investment (for a total of eighty statues) was approximately 440 million yen, and the road opened (with twenty-three statues) in 1993. In 2007, for the first time, the number of visitors exceeded one million.⁵ For people who have grown up with the yōkai images of Mizuki, a saunter down the road can excite memories of a more innocent, carefree time; eclectic writer and scholar Aramata Hiroshi describes the sensation of seeking out the next yōkai statuette: “Even if my head has been corrupted by old books and cigarettes, my heart, it seems, is still a child’s.”⁶

Figure 2.

In front of Sakaiminato (Kitarō) Station: life-sized bronze image of Mizuki at his desk. Photograph by author.

In 1993, with some twenty empty storefronts, the shopping street reflected the general economic state of small-town Japan. While these empty shops have all but disappeared, the businesses lining the street now are anything but typical for a country town.⁷ They are dedicated to all things Mizuki, selling a cornucopia of Mizuki-related omiyage (souvenirs) and “yōkai goods,” edible and otherwise. You can find books, DVDs, yōkai manjū (bean cakes), yōkai sake, yōkai beer, coffee, cookies, ice cream, senbei (rice crackers), playing cards, key chains, cell phone straps, figurines, T-shirts, hats, postcards, stationery, fans, handkerchiefs, scarves, and jewelry. Everything has a monstrous motif or is shaped like one of Mizuki’s yōkai. You can even buy dried squid on a stick, artistically fashioned to resemble Ittanmomen, an animated, flying strip-of-cloth, and a popular member of Kitarō’s yōkai gang. The theme-park quality of Sakaiminato is underscored as you stroll down the road. Here and there you find “life-sized” wooden cutouts of yōkai characters into which you can insert your face and have your photo taken. There are taxis done up with yōkai motifs and you might even bump into Kitarō himself sauntering down the street, having his picture taken with tourists young and old alike (Figure 3).

About midway along the road, you come to the Yōkai Shrine (jinja). At first glance, this shrine opened in the year 2000 seems like an obvious idea; after all, so many of Japan’s traditional shrines are dedicated to ambiguous figures, like kappa, tengu, kitsune, and other common yōkai creatures, whose demonic and deific aspects are not clearly distinguished. The Yōkai Shrine in Sakaiminato, however, is a refreshingly explicit invented tradition. Like many shrines, for example, you can dedicate a votive plaque (ema) to your prayer, but these plaques are illustrated with Mizuki’s images, as if the sacred “otherworld” itself can be found in a manga (Figure 4).⁸

Figure 3.

Costumed image of Kitarō posing with bronze statue of himself. Photograph by author.

Coming Home

Eventually, toward the end of the street, you arrive at the Mizuki Shigeru Memorial Hall (Kinenkan). While it is not unusual in Japan for significant cultural figures to have a memorial hall or museum dedicated to them, it does strike one as odd, and somehow indicative of Mizuki’s dry sense of humor, that this particular “memorial” has been established before the individual being memorialized is actually dead. Though well into his eighties, Mizuki is still alive and not only kicking but seemingly more productive than ever. In a sense, however, the hall does indeed serve as a memorial—for the Sakaiminato of Mizuki’s childhood, for the lost Japan that his work longingly invokes. As if to emphasize this veneration of the past and the transference of memories from one generation to the next, a life-sized bronze tableau in front of the museum features a version of Mizuki as a child in conversation with Nonnonbaa, the old Sakaiminato woman from whom he originally learned about yōkai.

Figure 4.

Ema (votive plaque) for sale at the Yōkai Shrine. Photograph by author.

Inside the Memorial Hall, you walk through an illustrated narrative of Mizuki’s life (replete with voiceovers by Mizuki himself), starting with his childhood right there in Sakaiminato. You then follow him through his experiences as a reluctant soldier gravely wounded in Rabaul (in present-day Papua New Guinea) and learn of his affection for the natives there and the way they helped him recover from injury and illness. Then you follow him back to postwar Japan, where he struggles to make good in a burgeoning economy. And you learn of his gradual success, both critical and popular, and his eventual rise to media fame. As a coda to the story, there are also photographs of his joyful return to Rabaul to be reunited with his old friends, and of course his triumphant reemergence as a hero of Sakaiminato, his hometown, and by metonymic extension, the hometown of so many other yōkai-loving Japanese.

The narrative of Mizuki’s life—his happy-go-lucky boyhood, his blundering military career, his self-deprecating rise to prominence in the manga/anime world, his emergence at the turn of the new century as a dry-witted patriarch—is well known to readers of his memoirs. It is a narrative of authenticity, trial, and triumph. Sakaiminato (and all hometowns like it) features as a sort of paradise out of which Mizuki (and Japan) is forced to leave, and to which he (and his nation) eventually returns. In this narrative, war is an important if tragic rite of passage for both nation and individual. Pen in hand, Mizuki is at once a keen observer and also a participant; his personal story unfolds against the backdrop of the Shōwa period, with its militarism, war, defeat, occupation, and miraculous economic rebirth. The Memorial Hall is a tribute not only to Mizuki and his entourage of monstrous characters but also to this national narrative.

The same narrative, articulated in much greater detail and with beautifully intricate images, is portrayed in Mizuki’s award-winning Komikku Shōwa shi, an eight-volume manga history of the Shōwa period. “If you think about it,” Mizuki notes in the afterword, “the ‘history of Shōwa’ is the history of myself.”⁹ And indeed, the text intertwines Mizuki’s personal journey with the journey of the nation—complete with political, economic, social, and cultural events—to document a collective experience and a moving set of shared memories.¹⁰ Not surprisingly, the war plays a central role in Mizuki’s account: we witness not only the political movements and conflicts that led to the war itself but also Mizuki’s own experiences as a soldier. Most striking are his battles with malaria, the loss of his left arm, and his gradual recovery through the kindness of the “people of the forest”¹¹ in the Rabaul village.

As in the Memorial Hall, Shōwa shi also details Mizuki’s 1970 return to this native village, a pristine paradise that seems a substitute for the Sakaiminato of his childhood.¹² But in the Shōwa shi version, we can read a quiet, understated sadness, an intimation that the “little heaven”¹³ of Mizuki’s memory no longer exists (if it ever did). In his war recollections, the village is a place of abundance and healthy fresh food, nourishment that literally saves his life. But on his return, Mizuki discovers that the water used to make coffee is full of mosquito larvae.¹⁴ He also learns that Epupe, a beautiful woman he remembers fondly and who, it is hinted, had a crush on him during the war, has led a tragic life, struggling with an alcoholic first husband, a sick second husband, and a sick child.¹⁵ Indeed, toward the conclusion of the eight-volume history, Mizuki documents one of many later return trips to Rabaul in which he takes his friends out to eat ramen noodles. When he notices one of them carefully collecting leftovers to take home for her family, he realizes for the first time “that they are poor. They probably don’t get to go to a restaurant to eat ramen even once every three years.” ¹⁶

Later, Mizuki buys his friends a used truck, and one of them comments, “I’m glad you have returned your debts from the war.” Mizuki, for his part, thinks, “I was probably dazed from malaria, so I never realized it . . . but even though they were poor, they never asked for anything.” It is left ambiguous as to whether this poverty is recent or something Mizuki only understands now in comparison to Japan’s newfound wealth. Whatever the case, though, it is clear that his friends have not prospered economically, while Mizuki and Japan certainly have. The truck he buys them, not surprisingly, is a Datsun made in Japan.¹⁷

In the text of Shōwa shi, Mizuki’s initial return to Rabaul immediately precedes another kind of homecoming, one that provides an ironic counterpoint to his own journey. These are the famous returns, several of them, of soldiers left behind during the war, soldiers who for decades did not know, or stubbornly refused to acknowledge, that the war had ended. For a quarter of a century—the same quarter of a century during which Mizuki rose to prominence as a manga artist and media star—they languished in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Of all the events from 1972, Mizuki writes, “the one that was particularly shocking to me was the homecoming of Yokoi Shōichi.”¹⁸ Yokoi was the first of three famous so-called stragglers; for some twenty-seven years he had lived in the Guam jungle, bedding down in a cave and surviving on fruits, berries, fish, and small animals, before he was finally discovered and repatriated.¹⁹ His arrival in Japan caused a great commotion; while his antiquated sense of patriotism may have seemed honorable to some, to many it was an embarrassing reminder of a bygone age of militarism and blind devotion to the Emperor. His homecoming, as noted in his 1997 New York Times obituary, “stirred widespread soul-searching within Japan about whether he represented the best impulses of the national spirit or the silliest.”²⁰

Yokoi Shōichi’s return highlighted the distance Japan had traveled in the years since the war’s end. His sudden reappearance in the midst of the nation’s remarkable economic revival was like that of a ghost returned from the dead, a living anachronism and the embodiment of uncomfortable, inconvenient memories. Juxtaposed with the story of Yokoi and the other “stragglers,” Mizuki’s own “homecoming” to Rabaul—a journey geographically and symbolically opposite Yokoi’s—underscores the advances of Japan as a nation and Mizuki as an individual. Mizuki too had survived hardships in the jungle and then struggled for economic survival back in Japan but, unlike Yokoi left to languish alone in the past, he had moved (with Japan) into a bright and promising future.

Indeed, as portrayed in his museum and his manga, the narrative of Mizuki is ultimately about transcendence and rejuvenation. He poignantly describes how during the war, after he is gravely wounded and loses his left arm, he finally begins to feel his strength coming back: the odor of a newborn baby emanates from the stump of his severed limb.²¹ But of course the arm itself does not grow anew; rebirth is found through transcending the loss—not replacing it. Mizuki’s left sleeve, in his manga as in real life, hangs empty, a constant reminder of the war that shaped him and shaped the nation.

Voiceless/Voice

Several weeks after my trip to the bustling fairground of Sakaiminato, I had the chance to visit another kind of memorial hall, also dedicated to visual artists, but this one strangely and purposely silent. A sober cement building in a bucolic mountain setting in Ueda, Nagano Prefecture, the Mugonkan—literally “Voiceless Hall”—provides a startling contrast to Mizuki’s yōkai wonderland in Sakaiminato. Opened in 1997, the Mugonkan is a private museum dedicated to artwork by artists killed during the Pacific War. Many of them were art school students or recent graduates, mostly in their twenties or early thirties, who died either in Japan or while serving abroad. Displayed along with their paintings and sculptures are fragments of their daily lives—diaries, letters, and other personal effects. The artwork itself is varied. The common theme is not subject matter or style but the lives of the artists: personal narratives, one after another, that ended too soon.²²

An almost religious reverence pervades the museum. People step quietly, speak in hushed voices, and children are told to behave. This is not the quiet of a conventional art museum; rather, it is as if each painting is imbued with a meaning beyond aesthetic value, a poignancy engendered by the short biography of each artist. And each narrative is eerily similar, telling the story of a young man with great artistic promise that would never be fully realized, a life ended before it could be lived.

Of course, a sustained comparison of the Mugonkan with Sakaiminato would be unreasonable. But having coincidently visited one so soon after the other, it was impossible for me not to contrast these two very different approaches to the conundrum of finding present-day meaning in the traumas of the past. Despite their differing objectives, the two sites share striking similarities: both are about the war, both celebrate visual artists, and both present their subjects as innocent men caught up in forces beyond their control. Ultimately, the Mugonkan is about regret and mourning, speaking silently but eloquently of the tragic stifling of potential, of the people left behind as the nation moved on. Visitors walk slowly and quietly through the museum encountering one brief episode after another: each short artist biography is an unfinished story, lacking a satisfying narrative arc. Visitors to Mizuki’s Memorial Hall, on the other hand, experience his long biography as a tale of close calls and terrible ordeals, but ultimately of triumph and narrative completion. Mizuki is the lucky artist who fulfilled the potential of all these other artists. His world—his manga, his Memorial Hall, his revitalized Sakaiminato—incorporates the trauma of war into a satisfying circle of narrative.

Indeed, this sense of narrative completion and the outward boisterousness of Sakaiminato even work to obscure the town’s own story as a victim, like so many other rural communities, of late twentieth-century urbanization and economic resurgence. This tale of depopulation and empty storefronts becomes but a faint, plaintive subtext amid the vigor of yōkai commercialism. Just as Mizuki himself emerges successfully from the devastation of his war experiences, so too Sakaiminato, at first glance, seems to have artfully transcended its loss of economic relevance in modern Japan by milking the popularity of its most famous native son. Although my own visit by no means represents a thorough exploration, I did soon discover that the streets just a few yards from Mizuki Shigeru Road are practically deserted. The proprietor of a small restaurant complained to me that most tourists just come for the day, visit the road and the Memorial Hall, and then return to the larger city of Yonago for dinner and lodging. For him at least, the fantastic world celebrated one street over is a colorful façade, a bandage skillfully applied to a still unhealed wound.²³

Perhaps we can extrapolate here two distinct approaches for grappling with the traumas of the past. The Mugonkan expresses a poignant remembrance of devastating loss but also intimates the possibility that the loss will never—can never, should never—be completely expressed or transcended. Inversely, Mizuki’s world actively works to transcend loss, enabling him and his hometown to prosper in the living present. To be sure, Mizuki is outspoken in his criticism of the Pacific War and of all wars. He closes Shōwa shi with a hopeful insignia of a peaceful future: crossed rifles with knotted barrels, and the comment that, “The history [of the Shōwa period] is a big lesson teaching us that we must not have any more war; we must never again commit the same mistakes.”²⁴ But in Sakaiminato, the clattering commercialization of memories and the clear, satisfying narrative drowns out the silence of those crossed rifles.

Postscript: The Larvae in the Coffee Water, or Rereading Nostalgia

One element that links the Mugonkan with Sakaiminato is nostalgia. Both sites nostalgically commemorate a prewar Japan that is simultaneously personal and national. In its simplest form, nostalgia might be characterized as a longing for a past (time, place, self) that is impossible to (re)claim because it no longer exists or, more likely, never did. But in contemporary cultural life, the affect of nostalgia is anything but simple.²⁵ Literary scholar and novelist Svetlana Boym has characterized nostalgia as tending to be either “reflective” or “restorative.” Within such a typology, the Mugonkan, by celebrating the art of students whose hopes for a bright future were stolen by a war beyond their control, suggests a reflective nostalgia that “does not follow a single plot line but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones.”²⁶ The narrative—broken into dozens of fragments—provides no solace or closure. Nostalgia at the Mugonkan is an excruciating affliction; it is a longing for more than a homecoming, for an impossible reversal of the events that caused the breach between now and then. It forces the viewer to reconcile the terrible events of the past with the complacency of the present and the possibility of a more sanguine future.

In contrast, Sakaiminato articulates a restorative nostalgia that, in Boym’s words, “proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps.”²⁷ We experience a set of personal memories stitched into the broader national history to represent a completed narrative, a linking of the past with the present through a happy transcendence of difficult moments. The trauma of war and irrecoverable loss is softened by an indulgence in coming home; nostalgia in Sakaiminato is not a bitter draught of insatiable longing but an ease, a kind of comfort food. Through promulgating a complete narrative, an idyllic past is neatly linked to the present. The memory of pain—and the pain of memory—along with its meaningful role in shaping the future, is bridged by a compelling story moving along energetically, inexorably, toward a happy ending. The danger is that the “fond backward gaze,” as one scholar describes the nostalgic impulse, can too easily make the present seem connected to a gloriously imagined past and accordingly threaten to “foreclose the future, to reject the possibility of productive change.”²⁸

Nostalgia is often seen in this way as a conservative, nonproductive, even dangerous form of desire, a longing for a mythical home place/time that can be manipulated for nationalist and other ideological purposes. But as Fredric Jameson once suggested, “there is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other.”²⁹ Indeed, several recent studies have set out to reclaim nostalgia as a creative, progressive force that, in John J. Su’s words, “facilitates an exploration of ethical ideals in the face of disappointing circumstances.”³⁰ My own view is that, if read critically, even ironically, with an eye for the cracks and inconsistencies, nostalgia can be translated from a wistful longing for an idealized past into productive stimulus toward a future that incorporates ideals without ignoring the realities of the present. Some presentations of nostalgia lend themselves more easily to this kind of productive critical reading, while others resist such narrative unpacking.

Boym’s notions of reflective and restorative nostalgia are useful for contemplating the way memories are presented and experienced, but they are certainly not mutually exclusive: the individual subject’s experience of one can supplement or deepen the experience of the other. Just as Mizuki’s glorious return to Rabaul assumes fresh poignancy when he understands for the first time the shocking poverty of his friends, so too the lively and prosperous Mizuki Shigeru Road takes on new meaning when you also visit the Mugonkan or venture onto Sakaiminato’s own lonely side streets.

The challenge of memory, I suppose, is like any experience of reading or interpretation. We must take care not to be seduced by our own longings for continuity, our desire for a satisfying narrative arc with a whole past, fully wrought characters, and a gratifying conclusion. There is always the danger of overlaying history with what history might have been, of convincing ourselves that Sakaiminato Station is really Kitarō Station. In a new century already wracked by international wars and lives cut tragically short, it is particularly easy, I think, to be seduced by hopeful, redemptive narratives of nostalgia. At times like this, then, it is fragmented, incomplete stories, like the disrupted narratives of the Mugonkan or the ragged subplots of Mizuki’s world, that most powerfully convey the traumas of the past. I am not disparaging all nostalgic narratives, nor criticizing Sakaiminato’s revitalization. Rather I am simply suggesting that, whether the articulation is restorative or reflective, ultimately the onus is on the reader. Even (or especially) when the presentation seems clean and smooth, we can read nostalgia critically, reflectively—so that we also see the larvae in the coffee water, the stragglers who come home too late from the war, the poverty in Rabaul, and the struggles of small shops on the side streets of Sakaiminato. Such details subvert the tyranny of the storyline, opening up the possibility of new journeys and alternative endings.